Dark Mode for Tink

We’re working on a lot of new features at Tink. With the latest rollout of Tink (4.5.0) we introduced Black and Dark modes. We want to bring FinancialHappiness to as many people as possible, and what is more ‘Financial Happiness’ than being able to sort your finances in a stylish way on the night bus one late night?

What is it?

Dark and Black mode are two new ‘themes’ in our app. You can now change from White mode to these two new experiences. The app is thoroughly worked through to make each and every screen look great in these two new color variations.

Three styling variations: white, dark or black mode.

Dark mode is a dark blue/green background (#003037) that goes along our color guidelines for the Tink brand. All the cards, icons, numbers, lines, and images are adjusted to the new background color.

Black mode is a totally black version of the app. The background color is as black as it can be (#000000) and we’ve adjusted all the components (cards, icons, etc.) to accommodate for this new background.

There was a good amount of work to make sure that all the screens in the app were adjusted accordingly. We had the good fortune of having an iOS-intern, Mani, over at Tink during this period who took this project and implemented it flawlessly. You can read about his journey at Tink (and a bit about this project) in his Medium article here.

Showcasing our new Black mode

Why did we do it? What’s the benefit?

There are 4 reasons we decided to put time into this:

1. Practice

This was a perfect task for our intern Mani to learn more about Swift development: he got the opportunity to learn the code structure and an overview of the entire Tink app by having to work on each section of the app while implementing the styling on each page. It was also a good opportunity to try the code structure to see how flexible it was to customize the app to different branding / colors in case that is needed down the road.

2. Battery efficient

During Google’s 2018 Android Dev Summit, they confirmed that using a dark mode extends the battery life of smartphones running on Android. It is previously known that high brightness on a screen reduces battery life. But when using a completely black background on an AMOLED display, the screen doesn’t activate where it’s completely black (#000000), hence saving massive amounts of battery time. Google tested the theory and found that the Pixel smartphone was able to reduce battery consumption by 63% when using Google Maps’ night mode compared to the normal (white) mode.

Android with black background

3. Popular

We’ve seen some of the bigger software companies out there planning and/or releasing dark mode versions of their software. Some that have released it already are Google, Twitch, and Amazon. Apple recently released an update to their operating system, Mojave, which included a massive restyle of the platform by including a dark mode option.

4. Healthier

More than being good practice for our intern and code system, and being battery efficient and popular, it’s actually healthier for the user, at least at night. If you look at a bright, white / blue screen late at night, it’s confirmed that this can disrupt your sleeping habit and reduce your sleep quality. Using our new dark or black mode makes it easier on your eyes by toning down the brightness and white / blue bright light.

Final note

To sum it up: we’ve added two styling variations, black and dark modes, to the current white one. Black mode is battery efficient, good for your sleep and a great way to experience Tink in a different way.

We’ve updated the app, it’s live in the app store for you to give it a try today.